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All Episodes of ROLL OUT! Now on YouTube
For those of you who don't know, M*A*S*H actually had a sister show that didn't even last for a full season in 1973 called ROLL OUT! How did this show even come to be? Well, when the network saw what a bonafide hit M*A*S*H became, they turned to Larry Gelbart & Gene Reynolds to create another wartime sitcom for them to bank on that success. ROLL OUT! was set in France during WW2 and focused on a supply unit in which almost all of the drivers were black, so the show's humor was rooted in race relations, as opposed to anti-war satire like M*A*S*H.
Stu Gilliam and Hilly Hicks (the pencillin thief in "White Gold" and Corporal Moody the medic in "Post-Op") played Corporal Sweet Williams and Private Jed Brooks, who seem to be Hawkeye and B.J.'s black counterparts. Other familiar M*A*S*H faces who were cast on this show include Val Bisoglio (Mess Sergeant Pernelli) as the unit's Italian-American CO, Captain Rocco Calvelli, Ed Begley, Jr. (Private Paul Conway in "Too Many Cooks") as his second-in-command Lieutenant Robert Chapman, who seem to be ROLL OUT's answer to Henry Blake and Radar O'Reilly, and Teddy Wilson (chopper pilot Marty in "The General Flipped at Dawn") as High Strung, one of the drivers who along with pre-SNL Garrett Morris as Wheels Dawson, appear to serve as comic foils to Sweet and Jed, much like Frank Burns did to Hawkeye and Trapper. Rounding out the cast is Mel Stewart as Sergeant B.J. Bryant, the unit's ranking non-com who dispatches the drivers on their assignments by yelling, what else? "ROLL OUT!"
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